Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

It had seemed like drunken bravado, one of those stupid bets you either forget about or think better of come morning.

  But Redbear was serious.

  Asleep on Michael’s settee, under a quilt of unknown origin, he looked beatific in a dishevelled, hirsute kind of way. Like a Greek god, Alexander himself here transported. Like nature personified, neutered by somnolence. Like nothing unsafe or deranged.

  But Redbear was an elephant, and stubborn. Irked, it seemed, by something the love apple couldn’t put his finger on.

  And he wakened.

  Smiling, smoking, scratching, belching, sucking tea.

  ‘I took you’re picture,’ Michael told him, ‘while you were asleep.’

  Redbear shook his head.

  ‘I’m doing a collage: Interpretations of Normal, Abnormal and Fucked.’

  ‘That’s the title?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Shit title.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Redbear pulled a face.

  Michael wasn’t sure he recognized him.

  ‘So,’ he grinned, teeth impossibly white against gums too purple; ‘are you going to do it?’

  Crap.

  He rolled his own.

  ‘Do what?’

  The laugh was derogatory.

  ‘Right…’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He picked the lighter from the carpet and turned its wheel, grinding flint like corn; two surfaces meeting, unequal; soft and hard.

  Flour and fire. Would he rise? Bake or burn…

  ‘You were all for it last night.’

  ‘I was…drunk.’ He was going to say, “full of shit”.

  ‘Full of shit, you mean.’

  The hardness in Redbear was new. Michael didn’t understand. It was as if he’d worn away the surface to reveal – not aggressiveness, but persistence. Redbear wouldn’t let go.

  ‘You’d have to help me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We could get arrested.’

  ‘So?’

  Why was he nervous? He’d done worse. He’d seen the inside of a cell.

  Then he realized: he wasn’t alone, there was someone else turning the page, dictating the words, another person involved in the mind game that to Michael Tomatoes was Michael Tomatoes, his to spell and shape. A third party beyond his control. Redbear, curled beneath a quilt he’d made his own and sure, in the near future, to curl under again. To infiltrate.

  Was that what he was doing?

  He could kill him, he supposed. But how to dispose of the body? Too big to trash. He’d have to cut him up, mail him to different parts of the world. Expensive in stamps, though. Cheaper to buy a spade. Or exhibit his remains, limbs and organs a mélange of disparate themes, from hunger to thirst, the transference of energies, biology made simple, in cross-sectional detail.

  ‘Any more tea?’

  ‘Sure.’

  With an axe.

  A Sunday in April.

  They had to wait till it got dark. Not too long, as Michael hadn’t got up till one, the intervening hours spent recuperating, in preparation, down the pub.

  ‘Should be easy,’ Redbear assured, his confidence bolstered by pints and roast beef. ‘I can’t see anything going wrong.’

  ‘No,’ Michael replied, incredulous. ‘Me neither.’

  Ten o’clock, and the city centre was mostly quiet, just a few groups of revellers milling like pigeons, tripping over one another and talking in high, dislocated voices.

  An ordinary evening. The rain had held off.

  Redbear hefted the cardboard drum and Michael slipped his arms through the harness straps. It was heavy, the drum cylinder able to rotate on a spindle welded to the frame of an old rucksack, a kilometre of thirty millimetre red ribbon bought wholesale at a knockdown price thanks to Red’s mum being dressmaker to an amateur operatic society, currently staging, complete with line dancing, The Barber Of Seville in Eighteenth Century France.

  The idea was simple. Take an eccentric path through as many streets, restaurants, hostelries and pubs, round pillar-boxes, litter bins, bench seats and lamp-posts as he could without being waylaid, stymied, pole-axed or entangled, doubling forth and back until the ribbon ran out. Easy. As installation art it made perfect sense. Childlike and annoying, his route would take in and tie up burger-munchers and cinema-goers, bind and restrain bar-proppers and pool-table groupies, cause pedestrian chaos, bring lovers closer together and strangers to exchange the time of day in a variety of ways from cordial to explicit, fist-fights erupting, drinks toppled etc., in the wake of one near exhausted impresario with no time to pause and a stupid grin.

  Or at least that was the idea. What actually happened was that the heavens opened and the ribbon gained an adhesive quality that left Michael Tomatoes glued to an information kiosk, just two metres into his jaunt, the bright fibre of anarchy sticking out behind him like a cartoon tongue.

  Redbear thought it hilarious. His belly shook.

  The love apple just sulked.

  Had it been his own idea he might have felt differently. As it was all he could feel was humiliated. He couldn’t go anywhere with the ribbon. He was defeated by a solvent. The drum was a solid mass, bending his back…

  Then the episode began.

  He’d seen a psychologist once, and that’s what she’d termed it; an exciting name for a mental state of absence. The truth was he couldn’t remember, not accurately, and the various eyewitness reports were at variance, but after the ribbon fiasco it seemed he’d climbed the nearest building, a four storey Victorian office block, and disappeared for two days over the slates before surfacing, smeared in dog shit, in a skip outside a butcher’s shop under refurbishment – fifteen miles away.

  It was Vanessa who found him, on her way to work one morning, the bus stop within earshot of the waste receptacle. Or was that nose-shot? Either way, she’d taken him home, cleaned him up, later admitting her obsessive attraction to “weirdoes”.

  Michael promised never to do it again.

  ‘Do what again?’ She mocked him, unimpressed by his proclamations.

  He thought a while before answering.

  ‘Love another.’

  She wasn’t expecting that. She wasn’t sure what he meant by it.

  He figured she’d vanish anyway.

  The calmness she brought frightened him.

  That and the truth.

  Meanwhile, a future self looked up at the stars in daylight. There weren’t many, but the few whose brightness pricked the blue did so in the pattern of a porpoise, a hunted creature playfully flicking its tail. Michael identified with it, smiling from beneath the umbrella. Somehow he’d persuaded a man to buy him an ice-cream, which, as he was distracted, dripped to his knuckles. The man had been about forty, in a business suit with clean shoes and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. What he was doing buying strange women ice-creams Michael didn’t know. Perhaps he was lonely, or merely sympathetic to ugly girls. Whatever, he’d followed this shoeless gamine a short way before capitulating to embarrassment.

  Michael, intrigued, had waved.

 

  The bathroom was spotless. The longer he stood among its fittings the cleaner it became. He began to feel dirty; perhaps the desired effect. The shower, bath and sink were seducing him. The toilet, previously incidental, solicited in tandem with the bidet.

  USE US! they screamed.

  He felt like prey.

  The approaching, silent, chrome and porcelain jaws of the bathroom widened to accommodate him…

  Feeling he had no choice, he turned a tap on.

  No water flowed, however, rolling round the sink till it disappeared in a fast stream down the plug hole. In Purgatory, for dramatic effect, he might have expected blood in its place, thick and lush. But the reality, hot and cold, was pineapple juice. From the shower head golden yellow pearls of stickiness. In the toilet and bidet sweet sluices an
d jets of…well, what looked like piss. That was the best description of it; liquid waste from some goddess, waters he was required to bathe in as a sign…of what? Obedience? He couldn’t tell. He was trapped. He stepped under the shower and glazed himself.

  All his body hair washed off, dissolved by the acidity of the juice. Michael watched it gurgle between his toes, scorched pink.

  He must look like Ramch, he thought. Maybe that was it. The man he’d encountered earlier had been bald; only not pink, but brown, as if the pineapple reduced its guests to their barest selves. Made children of them, innocent and clean, without the roughness of age and experience gained in the living world.

  Here they were as babes.

  Turning the shower off he stepped out, took a towel from the rail and faced the white door.

  Electric and pure, he was able to attract it open.

  A woman stood naked in the passage and he blushed, stepped aside permitting her access, then searched for his clothing. Gone, of course. There was the woman’s, blouse and skirt; but he decided against wearing those.

  He walked briskly upward in the direction of the room of bones. The doors to either side of the corridor were as they’d been previously, structurally unique. Now though, each stood ajar. Just a crack, a few millimetres of light or dark with the promise of colour beyond. They were designed to tempt him, to lure him from his path; whatever that might mean. The fish he found peculiarly alluring, slow and peaceful to the point of indifference. Dangerously sanguine: they too had to eat. He pressed on to his original destination, the one room with which he was in part familiar. Others stretched on with the winding passage. But it was into this he moved, for it possessed a splendid warmth.

  And an occupant…

  Rich in both curves and curls, reclining on the skeleton bed like a lizard on a rock, was the fat whore.

  ‘Tell me, Michael, what manner of creature are you?’

  The question, coming so soon, was a surprise. He searched for motive in her languid gaze, her mottled limbs covered by the vaguest gauze.

  ‘Man or mediocrity?’

  ‘Man,’ he answered, hopefully.

  She smiled. ‘Then take off that towel, and start behaving like one.’

  She spread her legs and invited a different conversation.

  She tasted not of pineapple, but liquorice.

  She gripped his head so that he could not draw breath.

  ‘How goes it, friend? Will history be enough for you? Will time, in consequence, become your greatest ally?’

  Faint, Michael was no longer sure what he was hearing; whether she was even speaking to him.

  Breath caught, restrained, memories surfaced. Of the more recent the suffocation of the blue man in her keep seemed pertinent. What was it she’d said? “Might he have been alive?” and thus have no place here, a stone’s throw from the furnace. Was it life that dissipated him, gaseous and chill? The love apple felt only the heat of her loins. He had no temperature himself. In her power, under her control, unable to breathe he became detached from his body, his physical side, leaving his flesh for his mind - where the flesh might be true or false, experienced through or via a separate, tangible being. Not necessarily himself. Anyone. Anybody. Any given reality. All things, right or wrong, correct or mistaken. Perceived, extraordinarily, by him alone.

  ‘A test, I think,’ she mused. ‘What say you, brave captain?’

  ‘A hunt.’

  ‘A hunt? Yes, I like the idea. But a hunt for what, sir? Butterflies?’ She was all sweetness, talking to this other man.

  Michael was unaware of him. On the outside, there was nothing to feel.

  He laughed quietly.

  Bones creaked as he lay down.

  The whore grew wetter, and sighed.

  ‘Something, I think, with four corners.’

  ‘Like a box?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Or…let’s see. If it were a cube, it would have eight. So not a box as such. More a square…’

  ‘A quadrangle!’

  ‘A quartet…’

  ‘Yes. Very good. In fact, exceptional.’

  She giggled, rolling her chubby thighs.

  ‘A foursome,’ he stated.

  ‘A foursome,’ she echoed. ‘A thing of fours.’

  ‘A greater number than three. A lesser number than five’

  ‘A singularity.’

  ‘A four-legged thing.’

  ‘And why?’

  The answer was a long time coming.

  ‘For no other reason that it is missing, my sweet. Though whether it wishes to be found...’

  ‘This fourth.’

  ‘…is arguable. Perhaps it is deliberately lost.’

  ‘Hidden.’

  ‘Concealed.’

  ‘Set aside. Buried.’

  ‘Beyond hope of redemption. Disguised…’

  ‘Sailing under false colours.’

  ‘Deviously employed.’

  They laughed. Michael’s ears popped, squelched.

  ‘Oh, Victor…’

  ‘Columbine…’

  Eleven: The Cat’s Feathers